Jayhawk Talk: The End

I’m sure some of you are far more interested in my thoughts on Kansas Basketball than what we did over spring break. I’ve been ruminating on the topic since Saturday’s loss to Gonzaga. The result is a classic two-parter. Here, in part one, I’ll look back. Part two will look ahead.

I picked KU to lose to Gonzaga in both of my pools. I was not expecting a 21-point loss that featured a ridiculous 39–9 run by the Zags to open the second half, though. Seriously, 39–9?!?!?! That’s what happens when you have an injured, mentally washed, physically drained in March, I guess.

I was more impressed than disheartened or embarrassed. That was a hell of a run. I told my Purdue friends that they owed me a thank you for KU getting the Zags over-confident going into their Sweet 16 matchup. That was the one bonus: KU won’t be next on the Boilermaker Redemption Tour, and I can keep my 2–0 vs Purdue since I moved to Indiana streak intact.

No matter the final score, the result was basically clinched last Tuesday when Bill Self announced Kevin McCullar was out for the tournament. Even if Hunter Dickinson was totally healthy, it wasn’t very realistic to expect a very flawed Jayhawks roster to compete without their best player.

Of course, the McCullar announcement set off a whole level of “discourse” about the true nature of his injury, whether he was soft or not, and his motives.

Man, I have no idea.

I know NIL has changed college sports a lot. I want to continue to believe that a guy like McCullar would play if he could. His game was never the same after he was first injured in mid-January. All the offensive improvements he made last summer were gone. Defense, which had been his calling card his entire career, was compromised. We had six week’s evidence that he would take, and miss, too many shots, not be able to lock people down on D, and generally be a negative presence if he played in the NCAAs.

Still, I wouldn’t have minded if he was on the court simply because it was March and you never know.

Oh well. Nice career. He had a chance to be a Jayhawk legend but whatever he did to his knee in January blew that. Sadly he’s going to be remembered for the last part of his career instead of how hard he played the first year and a half of his time in Lawrence.

As for the rest of the team, I’ve been telling you for months that it was a team where the parts didn’t fit. And that was with McCullar. The mismatches got worse in his absence, with no true perimeter scoring threat.

Johnny Furphy made great strides in January and early February, but hit a freshman wall in mid-February and never fully recovered. He has a ton of potential. He makes moves that seem effortless and are tailored for the NBA. I fear that means he’s going to be in the draft in June, even if his body isn’t prepared. I hope he and his family see how he struggled against stronger defenders, how his shot disappeared when he got tired, and believe that another year in Lawrence will turn him into a lottery pick. Maybe being a top 20 pick is enough for them, though. I say it’s 25–75 he returns. His student visa limiting his NIL opportunities will likely play a big factor, although there are ways around that.

Dajuan Harris regressed in almost every way this year. I’m not sure why. Maybe he was covering too much for the lapses of others and that hurt his defense? I genuinely don’t understand how he missed so many layups. And I continue to be baffled how he hasn’t done a thing to change and improve his shot. We keep hearing how he knocks them down in practice. But his shot is so slow and low that unless he is wide open, he can’t even attempt it in a game. This was his fifth year of college. If he hasn’t revamped it by now, I have no faith that he will this summer, assuming he returns for his Covid year. He is a fantastic player when surrounded by scorers and capable defenders. He won a damn national championship as a sophomore when he had three NBA players around him. I expect Bill Self to fix that problem. It would be awesome if Harris spent the next eight months finding a legit jump shot.

KJ Adams took a ton of heat on the internet after KU’s loss. I felt bad for him. It wasn’t his fault. Dude saw that other than Dickinson nothing was working on offense and tried as hard as he could to make something happen, even if that meant attempting shots he shouldn’t be taking.

No one gives more effort than KJ. No one has a bigger heart than KJ. But he’s not a very good rebounder because he’s relatively small, he’s better suited to the perimeter than the lane on defense, and if he doesn’t have a clear path for a dunk his offensive game is severely limited. I love the dude, but KU needs someone bigger than 6’5” playing next to Dickinson or Flory Bidunga next year. KJ needs to be a super sub next season, the first guy off the bench for the 3–4–5 spots. He still plays 25+ minutes, but filling holes instead of as one of the featured five.

I expect Dickinson to come back. He won’t get drafted and he makes more at KU than he will going overseas. He averaged 18 and 11 this year with a flawed roster that didn’t give him much space to operate inside. I don’t get how some KU fans don’t want him back. Yes, his pick and roll defense is atrocious. But so was Udoka Azubuike’s and he improved his for his senior season. Hunter’s defense looked worse because everyone else other than Harris often had no idea where they were supposed to be on D. Put better defenders around him and KU is a much better team.

The defense was probably the most disheartening part of the Gonzaga loss. Self has never been afraid to throw a gimmick defense out when nothing else is working. That’s how he, famously, beat North Carolina in the 2012 Elite Eight, rolling out a triangle and two that shut the Tarheels down.

But he did nothing Saturday, to the chagrin of a lot of KU fans. He didn’t try anything because he didn’t trust most of his players to run any defense correctly. He looked maddest when (insert any KU player other than Harris here) made a terrible rotation or messed up a switch and left a Bulldog open for an easy dunk or unguarded 3. The collective defensive IQ of this team was as low as any team Self has had. And that was compounded by Dickinson’s immobility.

Which gets us to who to blame for this season. I still think if McCullar was completely healthy, KU had a run in them with the right matchups. They also might still have lost in the second round because of those defensive issues, the lack of consistent shooting, and the lack of depth.

All of that goes back to recruiting. Self has won some big battles in recent years. Getting Dickinson, McCullar, and Remy Martin in the transfer portal were huge. Same with getting Furphy and Gradey Dick out of high school.

But Nic Timberlake couldn’t figure things out until March, and even then was a disaster on defense.

Arterio Morris arrived in Lawrence with a domestic assault charge. Days after those charges were dropped, he was arrested and charged with rape, then dismissed from the team.[1]

Elmarko Jackson was a McDonald’s All American, but looked utterly unprepared for college level ball, often struggling to dribble and run at the same time.

Jamari McDowell was too inconsistent/raw to earn meaningful minutes.

Last year MJ Rice couldn’t stay on the court and left. Sadly he seems to have some serious mental issues and left the North Carolina State team twice this year to deal with them.

Ernest Udeh got rightly pissed when KU signed Dickinson and left for TCU. Zuby Ejiofor beat him to the punch, going to St. John’s after Self talked about getting another big man. Either of them would have given KU a lot more inside depth and better defense off the bench than Parker Braun provided.

Of the four freshmen who came to Lawrence in the fall of 2021, only two remain: Adams and Zach Clemence, who left, returned, redshirted this year, and many expect to leave this summer.

Martin was a huge part of KU’s 2022 national title team, but Joe Yesufu and Cam Martin were big misses that year.

In short, I think rather than being a boon for Self, who traditionally is an excellent “make up” recruiter, finding players late to fill holes, the transfer portal has suckered him to a disjointed recruiting strategy. Freshmen get pissed off and leave when they see older transfers coming in, which robs the program of the stability that the dominance of the last 20 years was built on. Those older guys have often struggled to fit in. Then, more often than not, Self and his staff have signed the wrong kids. It’s become a vicious cycle they need to get out of.

Not a great ending for the preseason number one team in the country. But not unexpected, either, after what we saw over the past four-plus months. When on, this team was very good, beating Kentucky, Tennessee, UConn, thrashing Houston, and destroying Texas. They also got waxed by Marquette and humiliated in the return game at Houston.

It was the nights when things were just a little off, though, that proved this team’s ceiling was lower than we thought. The loss at UCF seemed flukey at first. Then they blew a thoroughly winnable game to a bad West Virginia team because they couldn’t play simple defense. A healthy McCullar who doesn’t go 6–18 from the field and 2–5 from the line probably means they win in Manhattan and don’t blow the game against BYU. Pick off three of those and KU is tied with Iowa State for second in the Big 12, likely seeded as a #2 in the NCAAs, and perhaps still playing.

There’s been a lot of grousing amongst KU fans about this being the worst team of the Self era or whatever. I don’t think that’s fair. It was one of the least fun teams to watch, for sure, because, again, the parts didn’t fit and they rarely put together those stretches that blew games open KU is famous for. The season really came down to McCullar’s knee, a missed box-out here and there, or a bad three minutes on defense. Fix those and I’m still not sure this was a Final Four team. But our perception of the season would be much different.

I trust Bill Self to fix the issues. He’s going to have to recruit better and smarter than he has since the transfer portal and NIL changed the game, though, to get KU back where we Jayhawks fans expect it to be.

More about that in part two.